• Home
• Calendar
• Publications
• Grants
• Programs
• Newsroom
• Store
• Cart

About OCH Support Contact

OCH Publications > Oregon Humanities table of contents

Oregon Humanities is a journal of ideas and perspectives published twice a year by the Oregon Council for the Humanities. Each issue includes essays and articles that explore a particular theme from a variety of perspectives, broadening the ways in which readers think about a subject and providing a basis for further thoughtful discussion.

Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Posts: Readers Write about Domesticity

Lucky House

A house is made of wood and stone; a home is made of love alone." Although certainly instructive in its own way, this classic couplet omits the importance of naming--the difference between "Christine's house" and The Dustbin, The Fridge, or Villa Villa Coola. On the surface, the difference between these appellations is the apostrophe. To the folks who live, party, or just watch television there, that apostrophe makes all the difference.

One of my former homes, the Lucky House, hosted its hundredth birthday a few years ago. Generations of inhabitants gathered to compare notes (where did that cat come from, anyway?) and recall the not-so-quiet indignities of the Winter of Broken Windows. I never signed a deed or lease, and barely fixed as much as I broke over the years I lived there, but I felt a big part of that monument to unstructured domesticity.

Many of the gala's guests never paid a month of rent at the Lucky. They might have spent a few nights on the couch, attended a previous party, or just dropped by for coffee. All of us knew that, regardless of its ownerless appellation, the Lucky House was in fact owned by somebody. But somehow the name made it less so.

While considering my own Lucky House tenure, I noticed a near-mania for naming: the '73 Chevy van that my rock band toured in was named L'Orgy Porgy, and the Chevy Suburban it replaced was called The Crud. These names obscured the vehicles' ownership just enough that we felt at home spilling gas station coffee and sleeping on their mildewed interiors. They also lent the cars and houses in question airs of glamour.

Well, the glamour may have been located entirely in my mind. After all, what's so glamorous about a van guaranteed to attract police in Midwestern states, or a house without ... well I don't know what it lacked. We didn't need cable, blazing-fast Internet, or long distance service, because we could count on someone dropping by with the latest news in return for tea, cigarettes, or a game of chess. The old-fashioned central heat in the living room made up for the lack of heat in the bedrooms, and presented us with an urban version of the wood stove and fireplace-centered domicile. And the Summer Sans Shower led me to my spouse.

Sweaty and coated with the coffee spills, cooking oil, and diluted bleach I brought home from waiting tables, I actually considered trying to fix the Lucky House shower; past personal experience had taught me, however, that I would be better off looking for help outside the home. So, I took my towel downtown and looked for friends.

One new friend led me to her house--it was a shared rental without a name and, therefore, entirely lacking in glamour, but it had a functioning shower. Now, that friend and I are subletting a friend's house while she's out of town. It won't make sense to call it "Amelia's house," since she'll be in Iowa, but it's certainly not our house. Before we move in, maybe the three of us can make a date to come up with a name.

--Matthew Hein, Portland

Ravioli and Peaches

Do you want some peaches?" Nana asked after the lunch dishes had been cleared away.

"Yup," I replied.

She opened the refrigerator and took out the canning jar. She put a few peach halves in my bowl and then sat down with the jar, spearing peaches with fork.

That's how I remember Nana, my maternal grandmother--through food. She was always in her garden or in her kitchen. The fruit, vegetables, and jam we ate at her house came out of her garden or glass canning jars, not metal cans. Cherry, peach, and apple trees provided the raw materials for jam, applesauce, and our lunchtime dessert. Her large garden served up salads, green beans, marinara sauce, and our Halloween pumpkins. And that wasn't the half of it.

The ravioli we ate--my favorite food--came out of her freezer, but each one was made and bagged by Nana herself. First she made the pasta dough and rolled it out to be laid in the ravioli form. A small spoonful of filling was placed in each space and then another sheet of dough was laid on top. She pressed down on the whole thing so that the form cut through the dough and separated the individual ravioli. Over and over she repeated the process, making eight or ten at a time to put in the freezer so that one day she'd be able to wonder aloud what she should make for dinner that night, before turning and asking me whether she should make "raviools," as she called them.

Why did she go to so much trouble? She could have just gone to the store and bought a bag of ravioli. There are many reasons for her ideas about food and producing it herself instead of buying it, but I think the biggest reason she did these things was that she cared about the people she was feeding. This was her way of showing her love for all of us around the table. I learned early on how valuable this kind of work could be. I also saw how little respect she got for this work. At a time when women were being urged to leave the kitchen, I was learning how powerful a place the kitchen could be.

Because of Nana, I saw how food could be many things--a way to commune with nature, an artist's medium, and an expression of love and care. I knew early in my life that the work we do each day at home is what is truly important for the planet, our communities, families, and ourselves. I set out to create a peaceful and loving home in which the daily work of living went on. And, mostly, it seems to have worked. I've had more than one person tell me what a peaceful home I have.

I always look forward to coming home. I don't can peaches or make ravioli, but I do bake bread. When I give someone rolls or muffins that I've made and watch their face light up, I feel the hope that just maybe they feel like I did when I heard, "Do you want some peaches?"

--Shari Burke, Klamath Falls

Help with Having It All

I love being a mother. My two-year-old son is a gift, in every sense. I love reading to him, playing soccer with him, running after him, laughing with him. I love it when he looks up at me in the morning and says, "I need coffee." I even, secretly, loved it when he said "ah s#@t," a few days ago when we were faced with slowing traffic. And it is certainly true that I learn from him how to be a better person; more compassionate, more flexible, and, even, more fun. If we were living in the 1970s, during the heyday of feminism, you might imagine that I had it all--that I could both bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan. The problem is that I don't want to.

Women in the United States now have the choice whether to reside in the public or domestic spheres. We even get to reside in both--to blur the boundaries, which a number of feminist scholars have neatly deconstructed. And though I don't want to be "supermom," I choose to reside in both the domestic and public spheres.

Deconstruction aside, my position as executive director of the Oregon Council for the Humanities locates me squarely in the public sphere, insofar as Juergen Habermas's classical definition delineates that sphere as made up of private people (though in his world, this would only include men) who join together to engage in rational and critical debate for the purpose of forming a public. In order to do this, I hire someone to help with cleaning and cooking. While this choice is a clear indicator of my class privilege, suggesting multiple layers of hierarchy within the domestic sphere, it also suggests that bridging the gap between public and private is still, to this day, a major challenge for women. And several months into my position, I wonder how other women manage this rift.

I'm trying hard to balance motherhood and work, my domestic responsibilities and priorities, with my intellectual passions and drives. While I have a supportive husband, I still need the support of other women, not only to help me with my domestic responsibilities, but also to understand that this choice is one of many ways to be a mother. While other women may choose to stay home and raise their children, I and many other women choose otherwise: in fact, for some women, there is no other financial alternative but to work. We can all be wonderful mothers, regardless.

I had a conversation about this topic at a reception at the OCH office. Female staff members and scholars alike agreed that the feminist deconstruction of domestic and public spheres has not done us, in practice, much good at all. If anything, it has created additional pressure to live a life of service to both family and job, without much time or energy left to devote to self. To be criticized or judged for this service adds insult to injury. Unfortunately, I cannot resolve these difficult and painful situations. Still, it occurs to me that the conversation is in progress, and because I am fully committed to the notion that the exchange of ideas precipitates change, I am hopeful.

And as I write this, I am working late on a Friday, ready to leave for an evening fundraiser and trying, once again, to balance it all.

--Cara Ungar-Gutierrez, Portland

Home Comforts

For Valentine's Day last year, my mother sent me a book. Not a book overtly about love. A book about housekeeping.

Coming from a woman who abhors housework, this was a curiously freighted gift. My mother grew up in the golden haze of the 1950s, one half of a Dick-and-Jane brother-sister duo, with a doting father and a disciplinarian mother who, despite a full-time schedule of professional social work, somehow managed to cook two hot meals a day for her family and keep her house impeccable.

Small wonder, then, that my mother skipped off brightly into college and marriage with no idea how to cook, much less clean house. Forced to learn, she eventually figured out both, but grace under pressure was never her homemaking style. As soon as she could afford it, she hired professional help; the same energetic, efficient woman has come, every Friday, to clean my parents' house for more than twenty years. This woman eventually became a dental hygienist and quit cleaning houses--except my mother's. When another longtime client asked why my mother was thus favored, the reply was simple: "She needs me."

My own housewifely disinterest did not go unnoticed either. So Valentine's Day arrived with Cheryl Mendelson's Home Comforts: The Art & Science of Keeping House. Within its pages, I would find domestic bliss. Or at least a swell doorstop; printed like a cookbook, with two columns of text per page, the book weighs more than two pounds. But Home Comforts is so much more. It is, according to the blurbs on the front and back, not just "to the house what Joy of Cookingis to food" but the "bible of good housekeeping."

Home Comforts is a manifesto, an unabashed call to mops and pails. When you care for your house as Mendelson thinks you should, your dwelling will cease to be an abode and become instead that great good thing: a home. For Mendelson, a house that is not a home is either lifeless or, worse, a hovel. And the souls of the inhabitants are as stained as their dishtowels: "People who think badly of themselves take these feelings out on their homes."

Unlike that upright Victorian Mrs. Beeton, who wrote earnestly about housekeeping in an era when few middle-class women expected to do anything else, none of these books can afford to plunge right into dishwashing and diapers without apologies. Mendelson's author blurb gives it away: "Cheryl Mendelson is a Harvard Law School graduate, a sometime philosophy professor, a novelist ... and a homemaker by choice." Is there any doubt about the order in which she chose to try out these various careers? Is there any doubt that she felt compelled to list those careers to prove that she is indeed a modern woman?

As a child of the seventies, I was raised in the pleasantly naive belief that gender roles were dead. The seminal album of those days was the children's record Free to Be ... You and Me, an aspirational collection of songs and stories that assured listeners it was all right to cry, and OK for boys to have dolls, and perfectly acceptable for girls to beat boys in footraces. It also had Carol Channing rasping through a routine about housework. "Happy housecleaning moms on TV? They're getting paid to smile. Little boys, little girls," Channing urged, "make sure, when there's housework to do, that you do it together." A generation later, we're still trying to put that "together" into action.

Mendelson knows she can't do it all; she might be professor and philosopher and writer and homemaker and wife and mom, but not all day, every day. What she doesn't mention is that her income and marriage afford her the luxury of choice. She is not obligated to do it all, and so she doesn't. Mendelson lures readers with the idea that they, too, can choose to be fabulous homemakers. But for most of us, that choice was never more than a fable.

By giving me Home Comforts, my mother was simply trying to be homey and comforting herself. I cannot resent her practical gift. Still, this is the same woman who, twenty five years ago, gave me a copy of Free to Be ... You and Me. The old gift pointed toward the great wide open; the new one looks resolutely inward. "It is your housekeeping," Mendelson writes, "that makes your home alive, that turns it into ... the place where you can be more yourself than you can be anywhere else." Home, it seems, is us.

--Caroline Cummins, Portland

There Goes the Neighborhood

A man's home is his castle. Not in my neighborhood. The people on my street make sure that I hear their music when they come and go, or whether their sister broke up with her abusive boyfriend again.

Adding to their behavior is the excuse for public mayhem that is the anniversary of the founding of our country--and that is why I leave town to go camping every fourth of July.

As I pack the truck, cars drive by every few minutes, stereos blaring. While I stuff a duffel bag with clothes a neighbor pulls out of her driveway and honks her horn to say goodbye to her husband. Next door a dog barks, one of those miniscule things that looks like a cotton ball with legs. Down the street a woman yells into her phone that her ex owes her money.

Human necessities packed, I take care of the dogs. Food, blankets, bowls; their needs are simple.While my neighbors' inconsiderate behavior drives me to near fury, the dogs don't seem to notice the noise intrusion. They sit, watching me work, with mild curiosity.

In the Siskiyou National Forest the air is cool and clean. A stream cascades down the hill, sending up a refreshing mist. The dogs jump in while I set up the site.

That evening I snuggle into my sleeping bag and the dogs lay down on either side, sandwiching me like a slice of bologna. They snore and twitch while chasing rabbits in their dreams.

After breakfast we walk through the woods. The trees sway in the breeze. The stream burbles over the rocks. The dogs are ecstatic at the new sensations to explore. No cars or freakish dog breeds disturb the tranquility, until we are startled by the abrupt cawing of a crow above us.

I hear it as a natural sound that belongs here and pay the crow no mind. The dogs react differently. Their ears fall back and lips curl as they look up at the interloper. Even after the crow moves on and the dogs go back to snuffling through the brush, their tails aren't held as high.

We both heard the same sound. How did we interpret it differently? Perhaps that "caw" was the animal world's version of "Spare change?" Perhaps within the idyllic, placid forest is an angry community of neighbors. Blue Jays play loud rap music. Beavers don't clean up their yards. Chipmunks hold screeching marital arguments. Flies are in everybody's business and mosquitoes, well, that's obvious.

Dogs don't understand car horns or rap lyrics so they accept those phenomena as benign. I don't understand the animal world and interpret nature as peaceful and serene. It doesn't make my neighbors less annoying, but it is somewhat comforting to know that while I am holding a pillow over my ears to block out a car stereo, somewhere, a sleepy bear is holding her paws over her ears wondering, "Will those squirrels ever shut up?"

--Daniel Latham, Medford

Ironing When Helpless

What did you do when he died?" I asked my grandmother about my grandfather's death at the young age of forty-five.

"I ironed," she answered simply. "Another widow in town had ironed, and so that's what I did."

I remember her old white enameled mangle. It was massive, dense, and unwieldy. Nobody wanted to buy it at the yard sale. I picture her mourning body hunched over the steaming machine, sweat dripping off her brow.

I hate to iron, even with my lightweight steam model. And yet, I have become an ironing fool. My nervous habit began before that of my grandmother's, chronologically speaking. Her husband had already died. My ironing is but a distraction from taking care of my young, ailing spouse. It is a mindless chore that makes me feel somehow useful in a helpless situation.

All of my husband's clothes are neatly pressed, so that he looks normal, neat, and tidy. The pressed shirts hide the protruding Port-a-cath in his chest and the front button area provides an exit for his IV tube, which connects to his hip pouch full of chemo drugs.

I snip errant threads at my ironing board, attempting to remove loose ends. Then I iron like a mad woman, getting rid of the wrinkles that have invaded my smooth world. As I write the life story of my ninety-eight-year-old grandmother, I find that I am confronted by hard times as well. There is seamlessness in this family pattern.

I must end, as I have a shirt to iron.

--Kari Mais, Florence

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities